Earnings Call: Q3 2024

Dec 3, 2024

Quarterly report

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Serabi Gold 2024 investor presentation. I'm joined today by Chief Executive Officer, Mike Hodgson. Today, questions are encouraged throughout the presentation and can be submitted via the Q&A box situated on the right-hand side of the screen. I'd now like to hand over to Mike to begin the presentation. Mike, over to you. Thank you very much, Scott. Thank you for the opportunity. As Scott just kindly introduced me, my name is Mike Hodgson. I'm the CEO of Serabi Gold, and I welcome the opportunity to give you an update. It's now December the 3rd. I've actually just come back from Brazil this morning, and the site, so very pleased to give you an update right now. Thank you. Can we launch into presentations? Thank you there, Rachel. The usual safe harbor statement. Right. Okay. In a nutshell, I think this slide explains what we're really about. We're a stable producer, sustainable operator. We've been in the region for 20-odd years nowadays, and we've been producing for the last sort of 20 years. We've been producing between 30,000-40,000 ounces, from principally the Palito Mine and some of the satellites. Strong history of resource replenishment, which is obviously key with any underground mine. The big sort of, let's say, step change for us is now, and we're beginning to see it happen this year and certainly next year, over the next two years, will be the development and the increase in production from Coringa. While we have Palito Mine in steady state of production, we have the Coringa Mine, which is now moving from development into production, and that's going to be our growth over the next two years. We'll be going up to 60,000 ounces at that point. We can do all of this without any increase in capital and processing, which is very important. I'll come onto that a little bit more. Exploration upside, we've got. Sorry, can you just go back a slide there, please? We've run ahead a bit there. Yeah. Exploration upside, we've got some very interesting brownfield opportunities in and around Palito, which maybe we'll be able to go beyond 60,000 ounces. That's for a little bit down the road. Next slide, please, Rachel. Really, this graph shows a little bit of the history and a little bit of where we're going. You can see there that right the way through from 2014, when Palito was a brownfield restart, we have been producing in that sort of 30,000-40,000 ounce range. Those green blocks on that stacked bar graph are the contribution from Coringa. You can see Palito stays pretty stable. We're not asking to do anything more at Palito that we haven't done for a number of years. That's very good. The growth is principally ramping up Coringa, and that's going very nicely. That's the first area there. You can see there, it's a de-risk growth plan. It's being funded completely out of cash flow. We obviously haven't taken on any of the financing or diluted existing shareholders, which is great. We will continue to grow and build Coringa out of cash flow going forward. Obviously, we'll have a very strong balance sheet at the same time. Our AISC is obviously completely inversely related to gold production. Our costs are very fixed and very stable. Obviously, just adding more ounces each year, our AISC comes down. At the moment, we're in the $1,700s, and we think by the time we get to 60,000 ounces of production, we'll be in the high $1,400s, $1,500. Wherever one wants to put the gold price, very strong margin, and this business is going to generate a lot of cash. The phase two, which is after we get to 2026, well, it's happening now. It is our brownfield exploration and with our view to actually grow our existing 1 million ounce resource to at least 1.5 to 2. We think we've got great opportunity to do that, both at Coringa and at Palito. That's really important to understand how much we're going to grow our resource base by and where we're going to grow it by, because obviously, we will then need to expand our production capacity, which is the third column there. That is going to be either stepping up the production and the throughput rates at Coringa at the existing process plant or reconsidering the standalone plant at Coringa. That will really be driven by, as we say there, the success of the drill bits will really drive where that production capacity will come from. Next slide, please. A quick snapshot of the company. We've had a very nice run over the last 12, 18 months. You can see from that graph down at the bottom, we've come from our low point in 2023, and this week we broke through a pound, which is a great milestone for us. We're continuing to develop positive results in terms of cash flow generation, which is very good. We've obviously just recently put out the PEA on Coringa, which kind of documents what we're doing at Coringa and how good an asset that's going to be. That's reflected in our share price. We're building our cash flow very nicely. We're sitting at $20 million by the end of Q3, and we hope to add to that by the end of 2024 this year. The cash generation next year, again, depending on the gold price one uses, should be very healthy indeed going forward. Top graph there, our pie graph, you can see the principal shareholders. We've got two big shareholders in Fratelli, a high-net-worth family office in Santiago, Chile, and Greenstone out of London. They're a private equity fund. And then we've got some other institutions there, Premier Miton, Gold 2000, and River Global as well out of London. Next slide, please. This is a pretty good graph to show you where we are at. If you look at that very tiny inset on that map, that gives you an idea. There's Brazil, and Pará State is a big state in the north of Brazil. Largely undeveloped, but it's very mining friendly, which is very good. Over in the east side, you've got most of the big iron ore deposits and some big copper deposits. We're in the southwest corner in a region called Tapajós, which has been a prolific gold artisanal field. In the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, produced something like 30 million ounces of artisanal gold as the garimpeiros, as they're called, the artisanal miners, mined out that top 20-30 meters of saprolite, the unconsolidated material, alluvially mined that material. The hard rock resources that lie underneath that are few and far between in terms of discovery thus far, largely because of a complete lack of systematic exploration and real difficulty getting into the region until over probably the last 10 years. If you look on that map on that right-hand side of the region, that dotted line is about the size of Portugal. Inside that's where this huge amount, 30 million ounces of gold was produced. That's where the main resources, hard rock resources of the Tapajós exist. We have two of those areas, those two red polygons, the upper one being Palito and the lower one being Coringa. Palito is where we have our Palito mine and the process plant. At Coringa we have the Coringa mine that's opening up. Which doesn't have a plant because today we're trucking ore from Coringa to Palito, where we have some plant capacity. I just want to draw people's attention to the line that runs up from the south to the north, that black line. That is a federal highway, which until quite recently was actually a dirt road, a paved road. Well, it was a federal highway, a non-paved road, I say. It was difficult to access, and it really meant that when we bought Coringa back in 2018, the idea of actually having some kind of synergy, operational synergy between Coringa and Palito was really out of the question. The road has been paved, and basically, you'll see at the very bottom of this page, the paving of that federal highway really did connect Coringa to Palito. We had a bit of a rethink once it was paved that could we actually not build a process plant at Coringa and could we actually move ore to Palito as well? The other reason that actually became attractive to us was the fact that the trucking capacity went right up, and with that, the cost of trucking went right down. Initially, it was 3 grams per ton. Today, we're paying about 0.3 grams per ton. Finally, and probably the most important point, if you look at that photograph, that is one of the photos of one of the veins that we have at Coringa. I think anybody, even non-geologists, can see there's a very strong contrast between the ore and the waste. This lends the Coringa asset, Coringa ore body to ore sorting. I had the privilege of being there just Sunday, two days ago, and saw this ore sorter in operation. Truly incredible results. It really does. All we have to do at Coringa today, we have a little pre-concentration plant. The ore comes out of the mine, it gets crushed and basically gets washed. The ore sorter, which is a machine that can actually separate by color, the red from the white. The gold is in the white, the waste is the red, and it literally just separates the two. This is allowing us to actually produce a pre-concentrate. With positive trucking economics, plant capacity at Palito, and amenability to ore sorting with the Coringa ore body, we can now basically bring ore out of the mine at Coringa, double the grade, and send it up the road to Palito. It's been a game changer for us, and obviously that's great news to shareholders because we're no longer going to spend $40 million on building a process plant at Coringa, certainly for the foreseeable future. Next slide, please. I talked about Pará, and I talked about the Tapajós. This is important. We've been in the region for, as I say, 20-odd years. We're not a here today, gone tomorrow company. We're very much committed to the region. I think that's been borne out by our success in moving the Coringa project forward from an exploration property into a mining operation. We employ a lot of local people. It's very important. We're very committed to the region. We might not be a very big company, but we are significant to the region. We are a big fish in a small pond. 70% of our employees are local. 32% are very local. You can see there, we buy as many of the products and consumables from within the region. Very important to us. Underground mining, we have a very small, minimal footprint. We don't have conventional tailing dams. We dry stack our tailings at Palito, and obviously we don't have a plant at Coringa at the moment. It's a chemical-free concentration process that we're doing. All that is very good, in terms of, in today's measurements of ESG as well. You can see there. If we just go to the next slide, please. That graph there. On the face of it looks a little bit complicated, but at the end of the day, this is a measurement of our tons of carbon dioxide per ounce of gold produced. We actually come out as one of the best that you can have. We're right down there at the bottom, 0.42 tons of carbon dioxide per ounce of gold produced. That's going to get better because at the moment, Coringa is on diesel power generation. Palito is actually on the grid. We still use some diesel generators there, but that's about to change with a new power line that's going to be switched on in 3 days' time. Palito will be completely hydro power, which is great news. We're then going to move to Coringa and do that. We are literally at the very best end of the spectrum for carbon dioxide emissions, certainly. Next slide, please. On the assets themselves, talk a little bit, just a little bit more detail on Palito now. We're looking at. This is the mine that's been in production for 20 years or more with a little break in the middle there. Highlights are what the picture on the top right is, the Palito tenement. You'll see Palito is the upper right brown box in that sort of beige shape, that base shape is the exploration tenement that envelops the mining operation itself. It's been in production, as I say, since back in 2002 with a break, but we took it on as a brownfield restart in 2014. As you can see there in the bottom left, fairly consistent gold production from Palito. It produces its underground mining high grade 6-7 grams per ton. The process plant is there, which has a capacity of about, actually a bit more than 600 tons per day. Now it's more like 650. We actually have conventional flotation and cyanidation that follows that. Correct, Palito has its ore sorter as well. This was really important because the plant was actually at capacity, but we did know with the narrow vein mining, you inevitably get dilution in there. We actually did a lot of ore sorting test work, and ore sorting works quite well at Palito. It's not the silver bullet like it is at Coringa, but it does work quite well. It was important to actually put an ore sorter in and use it to try to actually get some of the dilution going to the process plant, which allowed us to actually liberate space to allow us to put more high grade ore in there. It does work to a degree at Palito. The good thing about having the ore sorter at Palito, it meant that when we got into Coringa, we could do our own in-house industrial scale test work, which we did. When we started up at Coringa, we knew we were actually doing something on a very well understood flow sheet. On the bottom right-hand side, you'll see there the AISC statistics. I would like to say that obviously as the ounces go up with the Coringa contribution, that's going to come down. As I said, our costs are very fixed. We have a camp. We have most of our people not going home at night, so we have to feed them and accommodate them. Labor is a big part of our cost base, as is power. They're the two big costs in there. If we produce more ounces, which we will do next year, this year we're going to do guidance 38,000 ounces. Looks very good for us to actually meet that guidance, going into the last month of the year. Next year we're going to have a healthy increase on that, something like 20%-25%. We'll be hoping to do north of 45,000 ounces, and the year after it'll be 60. The costs are not really going to change very much. At the end of the day, we have costs of about $6 million a month, and as the ounces go up, but the costs really don't change very much with the fixed cost component. We're going to see the AISC come down, as I said. I would hope to think we're going to be in the high 1,400s, around $1,500 when we're on the 60,000 ounces. So a very healthy margin on our production. Next slide, please. A little bit more on ore sorting and, as I say, we have the ore sorter initially bought for Palito, a COMEC ore sorter, which sorts on either color or on density. This image, there probably not too clear, but if you look at the underground picture, we narrow vein mine these ore bodies. Typically they're half a meter wide and even mining them as selective as you possibly can. You can see the miner there doing that. We have half meter wide veins, 1 meter wide stopes. Even mining so selectively, you've still got 50% of that material going to the process plant and consuming vital capacity. Back in the day in 2019, to increase throughput on production, it was essentially either more milling capacity or try and get the waste out and get the grade up instead. We followed the second way. We thought it was better, and we bought an ore sorter, installed it in 2020, and then it goes into a sorter with a grade of around 2 grams per ton. The ore sorter can actually concentrate up that to, you can see there a product of nearly 10 grams per ton, and only one-fifth of the material going to the product or one-seventh of the till, and most of the till gets rejected. That's the waste. The ore sorter is great at basically as a waste remover. That's really the way we need to look at it. Obviously, having had our ore sorter at Palito, it allowed us to actually push through Coringa ore and push that through the ore sorter and the results were tremendous. Now we have the ore sorter very nearly operational. It is operational now, commissioning any moment now. The next stage, it'll be commissioned. Next slide, please. Okay. Coringa itself, we purchased it in 2018 from Anfield Gold, which then got rolled into Equinox Gold. We did a PEA on it immediately afterwards in 2019, which moved away from the BFS that Anfield had done in 2017. Why? Because Anfield did a BFS in 2017 for a full process plant and wet tailings. In 2019, we decided to move away from that. We'd had two tailings disasters in Brazil, and we just felt that wet tailings was not a route we wanted to go down. We were already doing a variant of dry stacking at Palito anyway, so we actually decided to move for a full process plant at Coringa but with dry stacking, and that was why we did the PEA in 2019. Sorry, back to that slide, please. We then moved our way through the permitting process, and actually have even now moved away even from the process plant at all, as I've just mentioned. We're just going to go for the dry stacking option. The resource at Coringa, very similar to Palito, 500,000 ounces, 7 grams per ton, very similar deposit. Just put out a new NI 43-101 on Coringa, a PEA which came out just a month ago, which documents the new strategy, which is actually just to have a mine there with the classification plant, the crusher and the ore sorter, and trucking the ore up to Palito. Next slide, please. That is basically the summary of the new PEA. What I think the takeaway from all of that is the mine plan doesn't change. The big difference is putting in the ore sorter. The simplest way of looking at this is when you take into account the way the crusher performs and fines, and I don't want to get too technical about that. What the ore sorter ultimately does is double the grade and halves the tonnage. If you've got ROM, if you've got the run of mine, volume of ore coming out the mine being 500 tons per day, which is what it'll be when it's actually at its full production. That 500 tons per day at probably a head grade of about 6 grams per ton will become something like 250 tons per day at head grade of 10-12 grams per ton. That's what it does. We'll be putting on the trucks about 250 tons per day at double-digit grades, and that'll be going up to Palito for processing. You can see there in the bottom left-hand corner, the production profile. There we are, 2025, we'll be doing about 20,000, a little more than that actually. That slightly changed. Now we're doing a little bit more, over 20,000 ounces from Coringa and ramping up to 40,000 ounces by 2026. Next slide, please. Exploration opportunities. Well, people ask me this all the time about what's the mine life. What's the mine life of Palito? What's the mine life at Coringa? I answer the question by saying, "Look, at the end of the day, these are high-grade narrow veins that are sub-vertical, so you can only drill from surface the first 300-400 meters." It just becomes absurdly expensive and impossible to actually continue with exploration. It doesn't make sense. You literally start with enough, and as you go down, you keep drilling. You have this rolling mine life. Today we're sitting with a situation at Palito where we've actually got around 200,000 ounces in reserve and another 300,000 ounces in resource, which is a very healthy position to be. Remember, Palito is only generating about 20,000-25,000 ounces per year, so comfortably enough reserve to keep that going for a good time. The first resource done at Palito back in 2005 was 400,000 ounces. The mine has actually produced nearly 500,000 ounces, and the last NI 43-101 we did just last year was nearly over 500,000 ounces. It has a great history of repetition. We've now got 69 veins in the entire property. We've only got 49 in the resource estimation. We're only operating on five, or well today, four of them, and we've only got eight of them actually in the plan. There's a huge amount of optionality at Palito to keep finding more resource and working different veins. As I say, the shortage of resource is definitely not a problem that we've actually got at Palito. You can see that from that image, open along strike, open at depths, open in all directions. We find new veins every time we're there. Again, it's not a concern I have, resource growth. Next slide, please. Over at Coringa, a very similar deposit. Obviously not as mature as Palito. The way I look at Coringa is, you can see there on those two images, that sort of red line is the extent of the tenement. On the left-hand side, you can see a brown line, which is a trace of the structure, the trend called the Coringa Trend, which hosts the Coringa ore bodies. Those ore bodies are probably maybe not 9 little ore bodies. It's probably one ore body. The reason I say that is if you look at that sort of 8- or 9-kilometer trend there's a series of artisanal pits, which were mined by the garimpeiros in sort of the '80s and the '90s. This particular series of artisanal pits, garimpos as they're called, pulled out about 300,000 ounces of gold in that period. Very rich garimpo. Now, as is often the case in the Tapajós, the diamond drilling, which comprises the 500,000-ounce resource, is only confined. That was drilling that was drilled underneath the artisanal pits. On that sort of image on the left-hand side, that trend is something like about 8-10 km long, but it's only been mined over sort of cumulative length of all of the pits is about 1.5 km. Around 8 km or 7 km of that trend has not been drilled. Now, if you look on the right-hand side, you'll see that same trend, and you'll see almost a continuous geochemical anomaly. Between those pits and therefore between the drilling, the geochemical anomaly is still there, high in gold. There's a huge opportunity here to drill those gaps and turn that sort of 8-km trend, of which only 1.5 has been explored, into an 8-km trend where it's all been explored, and I think we're going to pick up a lot of additional resource there. I think we feel very good about and very bullish about doubling our resource, our 500,000-ounce resource at Coringa to 1 million ounces, and that's what we're going to be focusing on in the next 24 months. Next slide, please. A bit more on the regional exploration. We're back at Palito there. You can see the red polygon, which is the overall area. What we're looking at here is a semi-composite of a lot of exploration data. The colors in the background are a magnetic airborne survey that was done back in 2008, 2014, and then in 2022. Three parts all done together. What we have here, we have those black dots are electromagnetic anomalies, which again, for all metallic ore bodies, sulfide ore bodies and in the Tapajos sulfide zones are where we find the gold. So huge amounts of prospectivity. If you add in the geochemistry to that, and you can see geochemical anomalies on there, and you add in all the green for activity, we have an overwhelming amount of opportunity here. For a company of our size, overwhelming is the word to use. What we have on here are seven boxes, and the reason we've actually got these seven boxes on here, they have been the high priority areas. The reason is not because they're necessarily the best areas, but they're the areas that we've had to do exploration work on them to keep the tenements. We've got about a 50,000-hectare area there, 60,000-hectare package there, and obviously we can't keep it forever. We've got to be doing the work, to keep the licenses as best we can. We focused on those seven areas because they were going to expire and last year was the last year. We've done work on those seven areas. Investors will recall that we actually had a deal with Vale Base Metals, where they put $5 million into the company for exploration in April 2023 until April 2024. We used that money to advance those seven properties there, through to submit positive final exploration reports, which you have to do in Brazil to keep that part of your tenements and move them to mining concessions. Otherwise, you actually have to let them go. Obviously that's why we did this. You can see on the left-hand side the ones we're looking at. Today, São Domingos, which is number one, we are actually drilling that at the moment. We've had some really interesting intersections where, again, we're following the good old Tapajos methodology of drilling underneath a prolific and still active artisanal mine. We're going to get some very good intersections there. It follows on from an intersection that we actually did back in 2021, where we actually had 7 meters at 258 grams per ton. We've got something super interesting there. We've since done geochemistry and geophysics. We've got a bigger target than we originally thought. We're just trying to pull it together and see what we've got. This is important because São Domingos actually falls into brownfield exploration now. It could be a satellite feed for Palito if we actually do have resource growth success there. That's kind of in progress at the moment. Next slide, please. There is São Domingos. I just talked about it. I forgot that slide was coming. There we are. I talked to that slide already. You can see what we're looking at. We're looking at a 1-kilometer anomaly, long anomaly there. We've got some nice high-grade soils over there, and we're just trying to work out what we've got. In the background of that image on the left-hand side, you can see that kind of scarring on the ground. That's the artisanal mining that's going on. There's been an artisanal mine there for a number of years now, and we believe that's draining the target we're drilling. They're mining the alluvial gold that's on surface. It certainly looks very, very interesting, and we're going to continue to work on this one over the next 12 months. Next slide, please. Also in this mix, was the Matilda prospect, which we discovered. Not really a priority for us, but this is really the bait that we used to get Anfield to... Not Anfield, sorry, Vale to actually put the money into Serabi for exploration back in 2023. We put 3 holes into what was originally a high geochemistry and magnetic anomaly, and high geochem for gold, copper, and molybdenum. We drilled it, and we actually discovered a porphyry copper deposit or porphyry copper prospect, I should say. 3 holes, which were mineralized from top to bottom at over 0.2% copper. We've since done about 21 holes into it with the Vale money, and we've built that up into a bigger sort of a part. It certainly needs a lot more drilling on it. Although Vale didn't proceed with the agreement, partly for their own reasons, we are obviously looking for partners to come in and look at this again at the moment. It's not something Serabi can take on. Our business is high-grade gold mining. Spending our cash flow on a big low-grade copper deposit is not really for us, but certainly it's very interesting and could be a great sort of joint venture business going forward. Next slide, please. I think this slide, obviously we're moving up this graph as time goes on. We're in a much better place than we were 9, 12 months ago, certainly. We're still, I'm sitting here thinking, even though with the pound a share, 20% of our money, 20% of our value is still in cash, physical cash. I think that if people can see straight away compared to our peers, there's certainly a re-rate that still needs to be done. There's still plenty of upside to be gained. I think obviously permitting and concluding our permitting is going to be a big game changer for us going forward. We're delivering on guidance. It's going to get better next year. I think there's a lot more to be gained on here. Next slide, please. Just a little bit about the board there. You can see there's myself, Clive Line, CFO. Andrew Khov, who came in a year ago, is our Bus Dev in the Americas. Strong team in Brazil, Helio Tavares and Rogério Alves. They're on exploration, our general manager in Brazil. Luis Mauricio, he's a Brazilian, and also very active in representing juniors in Brazil. He is the man, and his company are helping us a lot with our permitting out there. We feel we're in a good shape and a good position for concluding our permitting and positioning this company where we're heading. Next slide, please. I think that's me done on the presentation itself. I'd love to go into greater detail with questions. Please, thank you very much. Superb. Thanks for that, Mike. There's been a number of questions that have been submitted. Just to remind people that if you'd like to ask a question, please type them into the Q&A box situated on the right-hand side of your screen. Mike, first question is pre-split blasting practice at Palito Mine, as well as at Coringa Mine? When we can, Scott. Pre-split blasting is basically where, I think I made the point that the development ore at Palito goes to the ore sorter, and that's what we sort. The reason is, when we're actually mining in the stopes, we can already mine down to one meter. We've actually reduced the minimum mining width to one meter, and therefore, that material is not very diluted. When we're doing the development, of course, we're following the vein with a three-meter wide gallery, and if you can't pre-split blast, you end up with a lot of granite waste inside that blast. That's the material that actually consumes all the space in the process plant. The issue with the Palito veins is that they generally are more erratic and more irregular, so sometimes it's quite hard. Quite often the vein will break into multiple veins in the face, and therefore you couldn't split blast in that case. Every time we've got the vein. If the veins are regular and we can actually, we always try to split blast if we can. Yes. I would say probably only in about 30%-50% of the time we can do it. Thanks, Mike. Next question. The Coringa asset purchase included some processing plant equipment. What's the status condition of this equipment? Is it still retained by Serabi in storage and available in principle for use in potential future development of Coringa or Palito? Or is there some other status situation for this equipment? Great question. The equipment is in good shape. The two ball mills, which are the real guts of that equipment and the key part of it, they've never moved from the mine where they were. We inherited that when we bought the asset, as you say. They came from a mine called Andorinhas, which is run by Troy Resources of Australia. They're also in the state of Pará. They have been in storage at that mine or near that mine since that mine closed in 2016. We actually haven't used them yet, and they're still there under lock and key in a warehouse. They're fine, the two mills. The crushing plant, the crusher, that's a jaw crusher, the crushers are actually at Palito. A lot of the crushing infrastructure has been used in our new crusher. That's already been used and is now inside our new crushing plant at Coringa. The rest of the equipment, which is not really so important, is still at Coringa. It's not in great shape, but the real important parts, the actual crushing kit and the actual ball mills, they're still in great condition and they will be used when we come to the decision of actually when we go beyond 60,000 ounces, and we actually got our resource growth, and we want to increase production. Whether we choose to actually revisit the idea of putting some kind of process capacity at Coringa or increasing the capacity of the Palito plant to continue the trucking option from Coringa, that's the equipment we will be using. We won't be buying a lot of new process equipment. We will utilize that equipment. Thanks, Mike. Next question. Why did you prepare a PEA for Coringa and not a DFS? Okay. Always an issue with vein mines. Vein mines, by their nature, you cannot drill out to have a reserve before you actually do any mine development. Always with a vein mine, you'll have a degree of production coming from your inferred resource. Therefore, your economic study, if you do a BFS, you'll be in a position, we have 20% of our production at both Coringa and Palito. About 20% of our production, I'll say our plant feed, comes from the ore development that goes through inferred resource blocks. If you prepare a BFS, you're not allowed to include that in your cash flow. You actually have to allocate the cost of doing that development, but you're not allowed to actually include the contribution of that development. If you do a PEA, you can. In a way, PEAs are very appropriate for vein mines, where part of your evaluation or exploration is the ore development, which at the same time is converting inferred ore to reserves. That's why a PEA suits a vein mine as opposed to a feasibility study. Great. Thank you, Mike. What is the Serabi strategy, if any, for hedging of the gold price, both in the current and near-term period and anticipated for the medium, short, long-term future? It's a debate that we have regularly on the board. What I'll say at the moment is, with this ever-increasing gold price, glad we didn't. We nearly did on a couple of occasions. Crystal balling this is always very difficult. I guess if we had a big debt on our hands, we would certainly want to be doing more hedging to protect ourselves. We did a little bit of hedging about 18 months ago, and it worked out well for us. I think I would say at the moment, our two major shareholders are not supportive of hedging. That's probably the main reason. They want the exposure to the risk of the gold price. It's not just much hedging gold, it's kind of hedging gold in the Brazilian real, because it's not just gold price that we are watching all the time, it's gold price in Brazilian reals. It's important for people to recognize that the exchange rate in Brazil is as beneficial as the gold price increases. That's what we keep our eye on, too. For the foreseeable future or up till now, we haven't hedged, but as I say, we regularly discuss it. Thanks, Mike. Next question is, your year-to-date head grades are 5.28 grams per ton of gold versus 6.28 grams per ton of gold in full year 2023. Can you comment on why the head grade is lower this year? Do you expect the head grades to decrease, recover, or increase? Well, Coringa's been pretty much pretty good. The main issue for us has been the Palito ore body. There's no denying we've had some problems at Palito, since September 2023, until about August 2024. I'm really pleased to say, I'm hopeful those problems will be behind us. We've now done 3 consecutive months of much improved Palito grades. The last 2 months, the Palito grade's been virtually 7. We're certainly back on the road to recovery with Palito. I think you're seeing when the Q4 numbers come out, I think people will see very clearly that there's been a big grade in recovery at Palito, and that has been the reason for the overall average to come down. There was an area that we were mining a big part of our production in 2024. The first 9 months has come from an area called Chica da Santa. That was an area which we had programmed to be selectively mined. When we actually got into that area, it was considered dangerous, too high a risk to actually mine selectively in that method. We actually moved to a non-entry method where we actually did sublevel or longhole stoping, which by its very nature is more dilutive. We didn't anticipate being as dilutive as we thought. The grade came out at about four grams per ton for about six months. It was really a case of battling our way through it. That's pretty much over now. We're in better shape there. We're now contributing from new areas. One particular vein called Barroco, which we've just started in, and that's going to be a 50% producer out of Palito next year. I don't see why Palito should be not a 6-7 gram per ton ore body next year. Coringa will be better. I'd say we'll be moving in a much better direction. Grades will be increasing in 2025. Mike, you may have sort of almost answered this question, but I'll ask it anyway. Do you expect to meet the FY 2024 production guidance? If so, Q4 appears that it will have been the best quarter this year, better than Q3 from a production perspective. When will you be releasing the FY 2025 production guidance? Right. Well, that'll be very early in January. Normally what we do, we try and get our Q4 operation updates out within the first 10, 12 days of the closure of the quarter. I would imagine we'll have those numbers out in the first or second week of January. Things are going very well, Q4 so far. We've had 2 very good months. We've already got the official numbers for October. We're about to close November, and again, very good as well. Unless something very odd happens to us, Q4 will be our best quarter, and therefore it will mean that we will meet guidance in 2024. Therefore for 2025, we haven't set our budget yet formally. As I said, I think I alluded to before, we should be in the region of above 45,000 ounces for next year. That's a very healthy increase on the 38,000 ounces we're doing this year. That'll be our objective for 2025. Thanks, Mike. Next question. We've had quite a lot that have been submitted, so I will keep going. Do you have any expected significant cash outflows expected for FY 2025 now that the classification plant has been purchased? No, that's a good thing. It's going to be really the main capital items for 2025 is going to be the continued mine development of Coringa. That's where our cash is mostly going to go. We must remember that we're preparing the business to be a 60,000-ounce company. Palito is kind of stable at 22,000 ounces per year. The growth is all about Coringa. Coringa will do 20,000 this year, it'll do 27,000 next year, it'll do nearly 40,000 the year after. Next year, although we're only going to be producing about 25,000-26,000 ounces of Coringa, we're going to be developing the mine to be a near 40,000 ounces mine thereafter. There is going to be accelerated mine development at Coringa next year. That's the main part of our cost next year, really. The other outflow is exploration, mostly brownfield exploration, as we embark on this objective to double our resource or at least increase it by 50% in Palito and at Coringa. We'll be putting in a pretty healthy brownfield exploration budget next year. Somewhere north of $5 million is going to be our objective to get that resource up. As we grow that resource, we will look at actually growing the throughput. It'll get us to that point in 2026 as we hit plant capacity. We can go no more in our process plant. We'll be feeding our process plant with the highest grade ore we possibly can by ore sorting all of the Coringa ore, by ore sorting as much of the Palito ore as we possibly can. At that point, the plant is full. The next thing we'll need to do is actually add process capacity. As I said before, that's going to be decided and driven by where that resource growth has come from. If we've got a huge increase in the resource at Coringa, we may well want to actually put some process capacity there and go back to a plant there. If it's at Palito, which is probably a lot simpler, and we will continue trucking from Coringa, we'll put it there. That's why the exploration effort is it. We are not building anything big like the classification plant in 2025 anywhere. Nothing big. Of course, with these gold prices and exchange rates, we're enjoying a very strong balance sheet, and we'll expect to do the same in 2025 as well. Mike, next question is very much related to that. Serabi has rapidly growing FCF and cash balance. Consequently, are there any near, medium, long-term plans for dividend payments and/or share buybacks to benefit shareholders? It's certainly been discussed and is discussed, and I think we put in our annual report this year that dividend policy was now being considered. I think we have agreement from our principal shareholders that that's something we need to look at. We can't sit on a huge amount of cash, and we can only do so much exploration and so much mine development. Yes, that's certainly something that's going to be discussed further. Mike, are you able to update the status of LI? Yes. The LI is obviously dependent on the federal agency for indigenous people, indigenous communities, in Brazil, FUNAI. We had to get the LI. It is now contingent on us completing and getting approved an indigenous study, which we did. It's taken a long time to get that finally submitted in the form, and it was finally submitted in final form in August. It's in the hands of FUNAI at the moment, waiting for authorization. Our legal counsel that's helping us with our licensing is lobbying FUNAI regularly, so we are hopeful of progress updates. We're entering now the holiday period. I'm not sure we're going to get anything out of them before this side of Christmas. Certainly early in 2025, we are hopeful of a positive outcome. We're not getting any more feedback of any more edits required. It seems that FUNAI are happy with the submission. Hopefully, it's just down to them authorizing it, and we move forward. Thanks, Mike. Just to remind people who are watching that you are able to type in your questions live, and we'll try and get to them as soon as we can. Next question is regarding ore extraction limits. Can you please confirm the point at which the limit is applied? Is the limit at 50 kilotons per annum, or has ANM now sanctioned 100 kilotons per annum? Yeah. What that is, just to be clear, the limit that's on the GU license, which we've got until February 2027, by which time we hope we'll have the LI, which will lift that tonnage restriction, is 100,000 tons, and that is the tonnage on the trucks not coming out of the mine. Very important distinction and very good for us. This is why the ore sorter works so well. It is post ore sorting tonnage. We are allowed to move, or we were allowed to move until early November, 50,000 tons of material off the site to Palito on the trucks. Pleased to say that that limit was increased to 100,000 tons in early November, which means, as I said before, ore sorting basically doubles the grade and halves the volume. If you've got a capacity or a limit of 100,000 tons per annum on the trucks, that means 200,000 tons per year coming out of the mine, which is more than we actually have in our mine plan. That's great. What we're waiting for now is an environmental license, which comes from SEMAS to sit alongside that increased limit from the mining agency, the Ministry of Mining, the ANM, which we are very confident we're going to get that in the next few days. Mike, it appears only your development ore at Palito is put through the ore sorter currently. Is there an opportunity to include ore other than development ore from Palito? We can, but the problem is the ore sorting at Palito there. Some of the images people can see on some of our presentation here and on the website. The Palito ore does not ore sort so well. It hasn't got that unbelievably sharp contrast that we have at Coringa. If you push your high-grade ore, you therefore get losses. It's good, but it's not perfect. We therefore do not put our high-grade ore through the ore sorter at Palito because we probably get about high 80s% recovery with the ore sorter at Palito. Coringa is amazing. It's 98% one pass. Virtually no ore goes into the waste stream in the ore sorting. At Palito, some ore goes into the waste stream when you're ore sorting. What we then do, we take the waste pile and we pass it through the ore sorter again, and we scavenge a bit more. We do a third time, and we scavenge a bit more. After that point, you can't do much better. To put this into perspective, both ore bodies have a grade of about seven grams per ton, let's say. You take seven grams per ton of Coringa ore, you pass it through the ore sorter 98% of the gold of the ore goes in the ore stream straight away, and that's it. Do it once, bang. Very little is in the waste. If you do a grade of the waste pile at Coringa, the grade is like 0.1 of a gram straight away. That's that good. At Palito, conversely, if you pass say 7 grams ore through the ore sorter, the first pass, the waste pile will still be maybe 1 gram. You then pass it a second time, and you reduce the waste pile to maybe half a gram. You pass it a third time, and the waste pile will probably be about 0.3 of a gram. You can't really get better than that. It then kind of plateaus. If we have very high grade ore, like stope ore at Palito, you might have a grade of the waste rock eventually, even after three passes, still of about 0.6, 0.7 of a gram. We don't really wanna lose that. Because we've got the capacity of the plant to pass the ore, the stope ore directly to the plant, there's no need to ore sort the high grade ore at Palito at the moment. That said, we're constantly working on it. We're always sending data back to the manufacturer, and we're always playing with the algorithms on the ore sorter to try to do that. It is our aim and our dream to be able to ore sort everything at Palito, as we do at Coringa, and then we're always just buying back more capacity. Our objective is absolutely to feed as much through ore sorting before it goes to the process plant, so we can get the grade up, and we can squeeze more out through that same plant infrastructure. Excellent, Mike. Have you any plans to acquire the tenement immediately to the east of São Domingos? Immediately to the east of São Domingos? Yes, I know exactly where that is. It is an area, and obviously it bridges São Domingos, Matilda. Yes, we are in discussions. There's a lot of garimpo licenses there as well, which is a bit of a complication. Yes, it's definitely in discussion. Thank you. A couple more questions. I appreciate we're almost sort of at 3:30 P.M. What will be the lag from crushing, sorting at Coringa to gold production at the end of the Palito process loop? Pretty short, actually. We truck literally as soon as it's ore sorted. We're trucking. Well, at the moment, 250 tons per day. It goes through almost 24 hours later. It's in the process plant for 18 hours. After ore sorting, I guess, if you timed it, as soon as that rock is on the ore sort and on the trucks, by the various routes that gold can go, either in the gravity circuit or CIP, it will be a gold bar in some shape or form, probably within 2 or 3 days. Wonderful. Now, given the brownfield exploration is crucial for your phase two of growth strategy, when will you kick off the 2025 exploration program? And do you intend on providing an update of this anytime soon? Hopefully, yes. We're already kind of doing it now. We're not doing drilling at the moment. We're in the wet season. We're doing a bit of drilling at São Domingos at the moment, just finishing off 1 or 2 holes before Christmas. We might get those results back to possibly put out something in early January. We are also doing a very significant ground geophysics induced polarization, IP survey, at Palito too, in the area called POE in the north end of the property, getting some really good looking anomalies there, which look like strike extensions or existing veins, which is the objective. Again, that data should be processed and I think we'll be able to do a brownfield exploration update early Q1 in January. The idea of the IP and all that work is when the bulk of the rains are over in March time, we'll bring those rigs back, and we'll be drilling those geophysical anomalies at the end of Q1. The drilling will really get going in anger Q2, and drill right through to the end of the next year. Most of our drilling in 2025 will be from April onwards. Thanks, Mike. We've maybe got time for one more question, if you're happy to do that. Sure. Will the upcoming change to power supply source at Palito act to reduce the AISC? Does the existing diesel power setup get retained in situ as backup? I'll answer the last part first. Yes, it does, because the new power line that actually comes in, the good thing about it is we'll be first in the queue of that line, so we'll get all the energy we want. It's gonna save us about $8 million, not a huge amount of money. It's gonna save us about $1.5 million a year. That's a truck or it's 5,000 meters of drilling or something. It's really important. It's the power interruptions. It's keeping the diesel generators going. Mechanics have to be available all the time to keep the gen sets going. It just makes life an awful lot easier. That's the main point. We do need the backup system because the way the power, although we'll be on the grid, there's still what's called load management in this part of Brazil, where the tariff for power goes up enormously from 6:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. We'll be running on the grid for 21 hours a day, but we'll still need the power plant, our diesel power plant for 3 hours a day, because it's still cheaper to use diesel generation, diesel power generated by diesel gen sets for those 3 hours. If we don't, and we go on the grid on the high tariff, it just becomes very expensive. They will be retained, but used lightly. Wonderful. Thank you, Mike. We've been talking for an hour at the moment, so thank you for the presentation. We've got no more time for any further questions at the moment. Maybe just back to you, Mike, just for any closing remarks for our listeners. Well, I think I'm pleased to say this has been a great year for Serabi. It's been a real year of recovery. The team's done a great job down there. I've just come back from there. The mines are both in great shape at the minute. Brilliant to see the ore sorting finally up and running at Palito, Coringa running so well. I was a big fan of it, but I was astonished of how good it is. It really was. I think we're gonna be really looking forward to seeing that really sort of be commissioned in the next few days and running forward. The mines themselves, big improvements in Palito Underground at the moment and bodes really well for next year. Where we're mining next year looks very good. I really look next year with really strong optimism about what we're gonna be doing next year. Certainly with these economic tailwinds we've got at the moment, it should be a great year for Serabi. Cash is gonna continue to grow, and looking forward to a very promising 2025 with some great brownfield exploration success to go on top of all of that. Superb. Well, thank you, Mike, for joining us today. I know you've just arrived back from Brazil, so it is appreciated. People, when the webinar shuts, if you just take a moment to complete the short survey of the event that's there, and I hope you've enjoyed the presentation today. Thank you. Thank you.